I just found a new website called Spirituality & Practice. There's a page there called, "Earth Day: 12 Spiritual Practices to Honor the Earth" that I want to call to your attention. Here's one of the suggestions:
Rededicate yourself to the live lightly and respectfully on the planet. Repeat this vow:
We join with the Earth and with each other.
To bring new life to the land
To restore the waters
To refresh the air
We join with the Earth and with each other.
To renew the forests
To care for the plants
To protect the creatures
We join with the Earth and with each other.
To celebrate the seas
To rejoice in the sunlight
To sing the song of the stars
We join with the Earth and with each other.
To recreate the human community
To promote justice and peace
To remember our children
We join with the Earth and with each other.
We join together as many and diverse expressions of one loving mystery: for the healing of the Earth and the renewal of all life.
— U.N. Environmental Sabbath Program
(quoted in Prayers for Healing edited by Maggie Oman)
And I would be remiss if I did not share with you my favorite way of connecting with the Earth: Go outside barefoot and find a place to stand. Place your consciousness in the soles of your feet and have the sense that a stream of energy connects you to the center of the planet. Just stand there for a while and relish the relationship between you and your environment.
Ellie,
ReplyDeleteLovely blog. I, too, teach meditation and have just started a blog and podcasting site.
I appreciate what you are sharing. May it bring peace to many!
Blessings and Peace!
Yanni Maniates
http://www.LifeMasteryBlog.com
Might I add this, my poem, about renewal?
ReplyDeleteTHE WILLINGNESS OF SEEDS
I drove a spine of road through wheat fields home.
An old love going dumb, I looked for words
In fields that lay on either hand: it's hard, I thought,
To let a language go that holds a world in place.
It was the pain of loss which made me stop
Beside the road and watch a storm ease
Brooding from the south, the fields open to the rain.
Miles away, the rain fell whispering to the ground
While love lay speechless in this hull of flesh.
I considered language and the message of that far
And whispered rain, the distance I had traveled
To be stopped by pain between old language and a
Vision which made that language obsolete: so much,
I decided, depends on rain and the willingness of seeds.
Geo